Editor’s note: Maria Farmer is one of the women suing the Epstein estate for the sexual abuse of herself and her younger sister by Ghislaine Maxwell and others. Now she has released her artwork, via a tweet. This article by Mary was drafted a year ago but we postponed publishing it.
by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
Open Letter to Harvard University
Fair Harvard,
I, thy grandson, join thy jubilee throng.
My father, John Whalen, graduated in the College Class of ’22. Next spring I hope to show up in the Yard for some strawberries and cream at the Commencement of a new “Class of ’22.”
Dad died in 1980. He was a frequenter of the Language Lab on campus even in his late years – a Romance Philology major.
He joined the orchestra, playing double bass, and in 1925 helped found the Boston Civic Symphony. Ah, the fine old days.
Now, about blessings surrendering thee o’er. You have been lucky in some of your faculty. I can think of at least one who lifted civilization (and is still doing so at age 91), my mentor EO Wilson, (1), his latest book being The Origins of Creativity. I suggest you name the “Science Building” after him before he dies, so he can have a good chuckle.
I sat through Nat Sci 6 in Amphitheatre C during the Fall of 1978, whilst volunteering at the museum of glass flowers. Kaki Albright ran the program at the MCZ and inspired us. She died too young.
Dad’s two favorite teachers in 1920, were George Lyman Kittredge on Shakespeare, and Charles Grandgent on Dante. Grandgent was born in 1862 in Dorchester. I had Dad’s old copy of The Power of Dante, with Grandgent’s scribbles in it, but gave it to a linguistics-minded rellie when I departed Australia.
Well, I am not here to reminisce. I am trying to impress you that there is continuity in the alumni, and families thereof, even a hundred years down the line. We don’t appreciate seeing a member of the law school portrayed, in oils, by an artist whose claimed connection to that professor was as his torture subject, do we?
Last year I wrote to the Board of Bar Overseers, affectionately known as Bobo, to try to get Alan Dershowitz disbarred on grounds quite other than the Maria Farmer scandal. It had something to do with the Trump impeachment. Bobo nixed my idea, but I’ll write to them again with this rendition by Maria. Somehow, somewhere in the Board of Bar Overseers there must be someone who understands what “law” really means.
It is much more important, however, that you kick Dersh off the faculty. Think of how the HL students feel, even if they are not protesting this teacher. They may be too young to understand what it all means. I know what torture means. Not from having been tortured myself, thank God, but by having been a member in 2010-2011 of the United States Truth Coalition on the subject of MK-Ultra. Much of this is memorialized in my 2018 book, Deliverance. (2)
I followed the matter in my Australian years (1980-2018) by learning, through advocacy, that the upending of children, if I may call it that, is rife. Even as we speak, little kids in many countries including the US, are being spirited away from their family home by the likes of — according to Maria Farmer — “Law Professor” Alan Dershowitz.
It is very wrong for Harvard, the protector of “veritas,” to have any association with this man. He says he did nothing wrong on many visits to Epstein Island. That is not plausible, if you think about it.
By the way, your late Professor of Psychiatry, Martin Orne, was no better, and probably was worse, for having carried out experiments on the control of a child’s mind. He brandished his brutality right there in the William James Building and must have had many accomplices. Also, Morton Prince before him.
Simply thanks to that one “cockroach” portrait by Ms Farmer, it will no longer be possible to obliterate the connection to Harvard. A huge apology to the student body, the alumni, and the Cambridge public, is due and overdue. Some humility is called for.
Incidentally, I attended a seminar at the Law School last year and found the students to be looking, and acting, quite depressed. It will arouse them wonderfully to now engage in a real project of justice for these children. (And some of them are these children, no doubt.)
Here is another portrait by the same artist. It shows the torture chair. My late beloved friend Trish Fotheringham told me all about it. She “got the chair” regularly, starting at age 2. Yes, it is an electric chair that Taser’s you until you finally accept whatever they are telling you. I am not sure if the blonde girl is Maria herself, but it was common for these children to end up torturing others when they reached adolescence (though this scene is most likely a revenge fantasy) (3).
I actually have sympathy for Dersh, poor old thing. This craziness has been going on for at least two centuries, as we can read in Rabbi Antleman’s To Eliminate the Opiate (1973) or in Wendy Hoffman’s Enslaved Queen (2014). Please make the breakthrough, Harvard. Use the disgracing of Alan Dershowitz of the Law Faculty as your entree. There is no getting around it now, so please come out and set an example of honesty. If I can help you in any way, I will.
Now back to family history. In 1917, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell issued an order for all the lads – no lasses of course – to enlist and wait for a call-up. Thus, on becoming a freshman in September 1918, Daddy “served in the US Navy,” without ever leaving his student desk. He said the whole student body was dressed in sailor’s middies or army fatigues. Then Armistice Day happened two months later and that was that. I recently found his discharge papers.
Dad also told me that when choosing each semester’s courses, the Gentleman’s Rule was “Nothing before 10 o’clock, nothing above the first floor.”
Which is not to suggest that he – John Patrick Whalen — was a Gentleman. No bluebloods, we. Dad was the son of immigrants, living in a time when a man could encounter, on the front door of most busines firms, the sign “No Irish Need Apply.” His father, having been a horse breaker in Ireland, drove a team of six horses, circa 1906, for the Boston Fire Department.
My grandmother, born in Galway in 1868, was a scrub woman at a hotel in Scollay Square, completely illiterate. When the letter of scholarship arrived for young John, she, must have recognized the insignia, as I am told that she, Mary Hynes, rubbed it on her apron before handing it over. (Note: For the scholarship exam, Dad was told to “bring your own ink.”)
Dad was delighted to tell me that when he graduated in 1922, it was with a Bachelor of Science instead of a Bachelor of Arts to reflect his lower social status. The problem was that he had “entered without Greek.” Never mind that he conquered ancient Greek whilst at Harvard – the criterion was that hadn’t attended a prep school where lads would have learned it.
I consider such chumminess of the wealthy and “well-bred” to be perfectly OK. Everybody needs a place in the world, O Relic and Type!. Yet I imagine many of the well-bred are missing out on life’s real joys, by being tied down by group loyalty and buckets of secrecy. It will be wonderful for them to break out and find that all that pressure was poorly directed, if not a colossal waste of time.
As I said above, O keepers of the veritas, you are going to have to make a good response now, as a picture is worth ten thousand words and you are, pardon me, stuck.
So back to the old song from 1836 (before it got its feminist update in 1977). It was sung at the Whalen piano many a time, and I’m reaching for the Kleenex now:
(To the tune of “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms”) (4)
Fair Harvard! Thy sons to thy Jubilee throng,
And with blessings surrender thee o’er
By these Festival-rites, from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before.
O Relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,
That hast long kept their memory warm,
First flow’r of their wilderness! Star of their night!
Calm rising through change and through storm.
Farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright!
To thy children the lesson still give,
With freedom to think, and with patience to bear,
And for Right ever bravely to live.
Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
As the world on Truth’s current glides by,
Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
Till the stock of the Puritans die.
Indeed.
Footnotes
- EO Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWLoluq-HCo&t=2710s
- Deliverance pdf book: https://gumshoenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Deliverance__.pdf
- Revenge fantasy:https://annekelucas.com/writing/2021/8/22/sweet-revenge
- Fair Harvard: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fair+harvard
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